El Palenque doesn’t think;
Knows and loves
His only job
And does it;
Perfection without compromise.
Reality
Where owls, hawks
And sly coyotes salivate
Reduced
To lowest common denominator
When the cackling hen
Rises from a fresh-laid egg.
Old Jules
Copyright 2003 NineLives Press
Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.
Yesterday I got an email from someone called himself Rob, AKA ‘Nifty Chicken’ of the Backyard Chickens newsletter telling me I need to re-register.
“This is Rob, AKA “Nifty-Chicken” of www.BackYardChickens.com. I noticed that you’re registered for our newsletter, but can’t find you in our community membership. This quick note is to let you know of some important changes and to help you get re-registered so you can continue receiving the BYC Newsletters.”
Naturally, I’m deeply suspicious about this. Someone’s wanting me to become a part of their ‘we’ over there without me having done anything to deserve it, other than subscribing to their newsletter for several years.
Then I went over to the site instead of clicking the ‘register’ part of the email and the first thing I saw was:
Hi Peeps, Welcome to the new & upgraded version of the BackYardChickens.com website! There are a ton of exciting new features and areas of the site for you to explore. To help get started we suggest you… » read more
Can you imagine that? I go over there with more-or-less neutral intentions, other than a few suspicions about what manner of ‘we’ someone was demanding I include myself in, and the first crack out of the box he calls me a ‘Peep’? The guy thinks people joining his ‘we’ are peeps.
Whatever the hell a peep is. Strikes me this might be a group of ‘we’ folk who go around looking through windows trying to see naked women. Nothing whatever to do with chickens.
Or he’s an agent provacateur for Homeland Security trying to identify all the people who’d be gratified to belong to a ‘we’ that considered itself peeps.
I’ve donealready got plenty of ‘we’ stuff in my life. I ain’t including myself in any we bunch of peeping toms even if they’re peepers that like chickens. Heck, maybe it’s chickens they’re sneaking around spying on. Maybe they’re trying to find out where I am so they can come in here nights spying on the Great Speckled Bird and the hens do and talk about when I shut them up in the fortress nights.
Or more sinister yet, maybe they’re trying to see if I gather the eggs every day. Or whether they’re doing okay on the milo feeding I’ve been doing lately to save money. Or somebody over there read the post, Shame and a Confession About Inter-Species Sex and thinks because I have a perverted chicken I’d want to draw my circle of ‘we’ bigger and feel a part of some group of peepers.
I think it might well be one of those government traps like the one they did in Colorado a few years ago, sending in agents to open up a taxidermy shop, putting out the word they’d buy endangered species carcasses under the table. After a couple of years they’d bought and paid for hundreds of otherwise healthy endangered birds and animalcules and collected names dates and places of the folks killed them because there was suddenly a market.
Indicted half the community before it was over.
I ain’t joining no government plot to arrest my rooster. As far as I know he can’t even get out nights to do any peeping.
Old Jules
Posted in 2012, America, Animals, Chickens, Country Life, Creative Writing, Outdoors, Senior Citizens, Texas
Tagged animals, Chickens, country life, culture, environment, home, Human Behavior, humor, Life, lifestyle, misc, miscellaneous, other, personal, psychology, society, thoughts
Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by this morning.
That’s not my High Roller because I still have to migrate my Dropbox folder over to the spanking new E Dell Machine, and I’m typing this on the old one. But I’m confident later today will find me pushing this guy aside, re-plugging my heavy lifter, and getting back to where I left off a few days ago.
Came a bull-goose mano daddy-longlegs thunderstorm here last night. Sounded as though things were falling on other things to create the illusion the underneath stuff was being crushed, but I just crawled out of bed, turned off the computers and listened to the roof holding up as well as could be expected.
There’s something thought-provoking listening to an attack by the sky on a metal roof, provided the roof doesn’t distract things by letting it pour through onto the bed. But I’ve shown you pics before of how I prevent that with sheets of black plastic stapled to the ceiling to move the water over to the downhill wall before releasing it.
So I did a lot of thinking about all manner of things while the night and the roof talked to one another about how frustrating that sheet of plastic makes things for them.
One realization I came to involves having to go back and adjust times in the past when things didn’t happen, which is going to be a lot of work. I’ve avoided allowing myself to consider that a need for this project because of the amount of labor intensive format manipulation required to get the data into something I can use. Now the stress of not relying on a dying machine is reduced and the heavy lifter’s going to be back lifting I’ll probably be getting things prepared for that today.
Which beats the dickens out of stomping around in mud. The other alternative.
The invader cat came in last night, was up on the porch chowing down on the cat food the regular army didn’t eat. At least it ran off without any exchange of greetings.
Several other matters are begging to be brought up and typed, but my coffee cup’s empty, the temperature’s dropping and I sense I’m going to have to put on another layer of clothing. Probably need to hunt down that pair of gloves with no fingers, too.
So thanks for reading, if you have, and maybe I’ll post something that makes more sense later if I’m feeling up to the task.
Old Jules
Posted in 2012, America, Animals, Country Life
Tagged animals, cats, country life, environment, home, homesteading, humor, Life, lifestyle, Nature, personal, senior citizens
Sometimes you can’t help being a little embarrassed for Old Sol, showing off just because he has a captive audience.
But you have to admit, even the Chinese can’t do fireworks to compete. Some things just can’t be pulled off with the combination of cheap labor and US politicians dancing for multi-national corporations and banks.
Old Sol’s got his own cheap labor, I’m guessing.
And if he does they’re not forever counting themselves up to calculate whether they could march four abreast into the sea without wearing thin on the patience of everyone else.
I’m in the doghouse with all the cats this morning, but especially with Hydrox. The invadercat came in just at dark last night while I was feeding the can of cat food to the four belongers. Sat there 20-30 feet off the porch just watching.
Irked the bejesus out of Hydrox, especially, because I was taking its picture and talking to it instead of running it the hell off. This morning Hydrox is being standoffish and treating me with a disdain I rarely see in him.
But you’ve got to admit that looks like a pretty good cat, though I’m not going to let it stay around here. I don’t need any more cats and it’s well enough groomed to argue it has a home somewhere, anyway.
Hydrox and the other can relax, once they’ve punished me a while for causing them a momentary doubt about feline population projections for 2012.
I’ve mentioned guineas a number of times here, but I suspect some of you folks might never have seen one. They’re difficult to photograph because they’re constantly moving faster than you can realize until you try snapping a pic of them.
They look a bit like a cross between a turkey vulture and a pheasant. Most biologists believe the species leaked over here from a parallel universe and they’ve never quite managed to get a grip on this reality.
The biologists might be correct, but my personal theory is that they escaped from a Larry Niven novel, one of the Tales of Known Space from the 1970s and 1980s. Likely as not they were developed by the race that created the Bandersnatchi.
But what the hell do I know?
Old Jules
Posted in 2012, America, Animals, Astronomy, Chickens, Country Life, Poultry
Tagged animals, Astronomy, cats, country life, guineas, home, homesteading, humor, Life, lifestyle, misc, miscellaneous, politics, Poultry, psychology, Relationships, science, sociology
Hydrox jumped off my lap and stalked over to the bed.
“Sometimes you human beings disgust me with your pretense.”
Him being second-in-command around here, I try to keep him up-to-date on my thinkings and directions. Seems prudent to me because he’ll have to take over if I kick. I’d just been asking him if he thought we could get along okay living in a travel trailer.
“Just what ‘we’ are we talking about here? You and me? You and all the cats?” He glared at me. “You, the cats and the chickens?”
I shrugged, wondering where he was going with this. I felt a tirade in the making. “Just you cats and me. The chickens can’t be part of it.”
“Well, that’s a relief, anyway. But I think you need to think through this second-in-command crap and all the what-if-you-ain’t-around side of it.” He gestured with his nose toward the porch. “The only ‘we’ worth talking about involves mutual resolve. Creatures willing to allow the well-being of others within the ‘we’ to influence what they do. No creature unconcerned for the well-being of the others, no creature the others don’t have a commitment to, can be part of a meaningful ‘we’.”
I thought about it a moment. “That makes sense. It’s why I was trying to keep you up-to-snuff on things.”
His frustration was obvious. “Yeah, and that’s where you’re proving how stupid you are. For me,” He tweaked a claw under his chin, “the only ‘we’ around here is you and me. And maybe Niaid, just a whisker.”
This rattled me, but he went on before I could say anything. “When that coon on the porch ran at you and I jumped in, that’s ‘we’. When you go to town and buy food for us, that’s ‘we’. But do you see Tabby or Shiva the Cow Cat lifting a paw for me if I was starving? Do you see either of them jumping in if a coon attacked me?”
He waited while I considered it. “I suppose I don’t.”
“Then they’re not a part of any ‘we’ I belong to.”
The more I pondered it the more it seemed to me he’d come upon an important thread in the fabric of reality I’d been overlooking. Not just with cats and chickens, but with every piece of human intercourse around me most of my life.
When a person goes down to City Hall, or the County Courthouse to perform some necessary business, for instance, and the clerk begins the ritual of obstruction, a ‘we’ is in the process of being defined. The clerk is the spear-point for a huge ‘we’ of contradictory demands on the ‘we’ you occupy.
“Do you have proof of residence?”
“There’s my driver’s license.”
“That’s not enough. I need a utility bill or tax return.”
“I didn’t bring that.”
“Then I can’t help you.”
The ‘we’ that clerk represents just defined a boundary excluding you from that ‘we’ and placing you inside another ‘we’ it considers an enemy. And in a real world, that definition would be mutually recognized, rather than singularly by the human spear-point drawing the boundary.
Which is probably why representative democracy was doomed to eventual failure. In a fantasy of wishful thinking a population created ‘we’ with a set of unrealistic boundaries. When new ‘we’ entities developed around government centers those included in the ‘we’ tribes were those they associated with, lived near, shared a commonality with. In Washington, D.C. In Austin, Texas.
And inevitably those outside that ‘we’ became an obstruction, a product, an enemy to their ‘we’.
“The only ‘we’ worth talking about involves mutual resolve. Creatures willing to allow the well-being of others within the ‘we’ to influence what they do. No creature unconcerned for the well-being of the others within the ‘we’, no creature the others don’t have a commitment to, can be part of a meaningful ‘we’.”
Sometimes it takes an outsider to the human ‘we’ constructions, a feline with a firm hold on reality, to recognize the obvious.
Old Jules
“Electing pet skunks to guard the henhouse might work for a while. But the skunk-instincts and chickens behind the walls they’re guarding metamorphoses the ‘we’ they live in. The skunks become a we with a priority of digging under chicken-house walls and the we of being pet skunks fades until it no longer can call itself a we.” Josephus Minimus
Posted in 2012, America, Animals, Communication, Current Issues, Liars, Politics, Poultry, Relationships, Survival
Tagged animals, cats, country life, culture, economy, Education, Events, History, Human Behavior, humor, Life, lifestyle, misc, miscellaneous, psychology, Relationships, society, sociology, thoughts
Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a visit.
The Toothless Soothsayer was going to be my post for today, but as I was working on it yesterday I accidently hit the ‘PUBLISH’ button and it became history.
It’s going to be a busy day here. It’s been almost a month since I’ve been to town for provisions and I’ve got a list two-pages long of things I’ve runned out of already, or that I’m down to bare bones on. The cats have been threatening to go on strike if I don’t get some other flavors of canned food, the chickens are fighting the cats for dry cat food, and the deer are complaining about what’s available to steal from the felines and chickens.
I thought I’d stocked up enough on the old kind of cheap lightbulbs, but the cheapo ones burn out a lot faster than a person might expect. I’m hoping I can find a few more on the shelves to snag before lightbulb-Y2K happens.
Most of you probably haven’t noticed what’s happened to the price of feed grains, but I expect you’ll be seeing it on the grocery shelves in the form of pricetags before long. The price of chicken scratch is up about 25 percent from sometime a while back, and layer pellets up almost that.
The flock is free ranging a lot further than they used to because I’ve cut down of how much I put out for them. It’s a tightrope, making sure they have enough to supplement their forage, but keeping it down to a level so’s they don’t waste it, which they’ll do. They’ve always been spoiled, profligate, ungrateful birds. But now they’re being driven by necessity to range out a quarter-mile, which is the idea behind free-rangers but too good for them to allow them to appreciate it.
A while back my laser mouse with a cord went out, and digging around I found a cordless one I’d never been satisfied with from several years ago. Out of hunger I put a couple of triple-A batteries in it and found it worked okay. Couldn’t recall why I’d abandoned it.
Then I discovered it goes through batteries something ugly. It’s a gas hog and I don’t think my need to have a cordless mouse is worth the price of keeping it on the road. Probably it’s going to be me tied to the comp at the end of a fiber-optic cord again.
If you’re travelling out in the vicinity of Grants, New Mexico, and you see the cat at the top of the page, tell her Hydrox, Niaid and I said hello. I doubt you’ll see her because she vanished in 2003 and we figured she’d joined Mehitabels #1 and #2 on permanent mouse patrol.
But you never know.
Old Jules
Posted in Animals, Country Life, Free-ranging-chickens, Grants, New Mexico, NM, Poultry, Senior Citizens, Solitude, Survival, Texas
Tagged animals, cats, Chickens, country life, home, homesteading, humor, Life, lifestyle, misc, miscellaneous, senior citizens, society, sociology
Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read.
WordPress is being a communist this morning. Or maybe the world came to an end last night sometime but it hasn’t gotten to me yet because I’m so far out in the country.
I was going to regale you this morning with some things I dug up online about building and retrofitting hydrogen generators to internal combustion engines yesterday but on the off chance the world ended last night, I won’t. The whole thing might be a moot issue. Talking Our Way Into Oblivion – Hydrogen and Hot Air
I’d also thought I’d share with you a couple of interesting things that appear to occur when the center of mass of a system of orbiting bodies changes, but if the world ended there’s no point getting into that, either. I suppose I’ll be obliged to break my iron discipline and focus to tell you about a couple of things happened here a while back.
A while back this dove flew in here and spent a few weeks sharing the chicken feed on the ground.
I’d never seen a white dove before. It’s forty miles to the nearest town of any size, fifteen miles to a village big enough to have a gas station/convenience store. So I didn’t figure it was a pet.
But when I approached it on the ground it didn’t fly. At first I thought it was injured or sick.
It had no fear at all. Nothing seemed to be wrong with it.
A week or two after these pictures were taken it began spending more time higher in the trees and less on the ground. Then it evidently just decided to move on to whatever was waiting for it somewhere else.
A free spirit. Sort of reminded me of the Rainbow folk I’ve shared campsites with in remote places and occasionally picked up as hitch hikers. Didn’t have much in common with the wild doves around here and nothing at all with birds somewhere else in houses with cages. Marching to her own drum, not letting anything get into the way of doing it. But not living in fear.
Which behooves me to tell you a bit about the Rainbow Family.
I first attended a Rainbow Gathering as part of a team of New Mexico Emergency Management Planning and Coordination [EMPAC] personnel assigned to be there with the National Guard during the Taos gathering of the early 1990s. I’d never heard of the Rainbow group prior to that, had no idea what to expect because neither did anyone else in New Mexico government.
What I observed was Woodstock without the music, a lot of folks who reminded me of my own younger times of long hair, protest, sex, drugs and rock and roll on the family side of things.
On the other side I saw National Guard troops loaded with live ammuntion and no clear instructions and rules of engagement being frequently hassled, treated with condescension alternately with re-enactments of some flower-chile ‘Come Join Us’ pleas from earlier times. ‘Family’ members running alongside government vehicles engaging in every form of engagement except disengagement.
And to complicate matters further, a civilian group of Taos Hispanics who wanted nothing so much as the gathering broken up and out of those mountains they considered their own.
I spent a harrowing week or two up there trying to keep my mind from falling into a state of spacial-time disorientation. When it was all over we drove back to Santa Fe wiping our brows in relief that nobody’d been shot, beaten to death by locals, no major incidents. My thoughts at the time were as far from ever wanting to see another Rainbow Family member as they could get and stay on the planet Earth.
I count myself lucky to have encountered many of Family members in other settings during the two decades afterward, picking them up hitch hiking, sharing remote campsites, discovering there’s a side to some part of the Rainbow Family membership I hadn’t noticed in the Taos experience.
Gypsy-like free-spirited, thoughtful and considerate people just doing their own thing, trying their best not to leave any bigger mark where they’ve been than they absolutely must. Good pleasant folks to spend some time with.
So long, I’d have to add, as a person stays clear of the party-animals and really cool people drawn to the mass gathering.
Old Jules
Posted in 2000's, 2011, Adventure, America, Animals, Country Life, hitch hiking, Human Behavior, New Mexico, NM, Solitude, Survival, Texas
Tagged animals, country life, culture, environment, home, Human Behavior, humor, Life, lifestyle, miscellaneous, Nature, New Mexico, other, poems, society, sociology, Wildlife
I mentioned the other day how Shiva the Cow Cat dropped the ball while we were praying up Old Sol. I’m not going to say with certainty Shiva’s responsible for this, but if she is, I’m going to give her a special scratch behind the ears as a reward.
“CORONAL HOLE: NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory is monitoring a dark gash in the sun’s atmosphere–a coronal hole. It’s the dark vertical feature in this extreme UV image taken on Jan. 13th:
“Coronal holes are places where the sun’s magnetic field opens up and allows the solar wind to escape. This yawning hole is about 120,000 km wide and more than a million km long. Solar wind flowing from its UV-dark abyss will reach Earth on Jan. 16th or 17th, possibly sparking auroras for high-latitude sky watchers.”
Mayan calendar enthusiasts, on the other hand, choose to ignore the coincidence of Shiva’s lapse and attribute the hole to the obvious sinister consequences of the rock calendar having runned spang out of numbers.
Meanwhile, astrophysicists, unaware of Shiva’s blink, speculate it’s the work of Proxima Centauri, a hot tempered red dwarf cholla who hangs out in the same honkytonks as Old Sol, and who has a long history with a switch-blade.
I’m leaning to Shiva doing it, but what the hell do I know?
Old Jules
That vertical rift you see on Old Sol this morning is a consequence of neglect. While the Reiki cats and I were praying him up this morning Shiva the Cow Cat got distracted looking at the full moon still high on the other side of the sky. She got out of harmony with the rest of us and the result speaks for itself.
Life’s full of that sort of thing here on this planet. You can’t have any confidence you can get by with anything. A couple of titanosaurs in Bolivia a few million years ago have themselves a secret rendezvous and next thing you know it surfaces and human beings are poking around nosing into their business.
Some Ichnogenus Gigandipus in Utah puts his foot off the designated pathway and a few million years later you’ve got the authorities swarming his footprints catching him out.
A lot of people think it’s just cameras, but that’s not right. Do you think this guy in Kenya a million and a half years ago would have done anything different if he’d known it was going to come out someday? He’d probably feel he pushed a stale yellow light that turned red before he got through the intersection and the camera got him. He’s sitting out there somewhere fossilized waiting to get the ticket in the mail.
The planet and the Universe have us brainwashed into thinking we don’t leave any tracks. But it’s a trick, and if we wake up to what we’re doing, say with our tracks of one sort, it sneaks in and preserves some other sort without our noticing it.
For instance, back when they started replacing real audience laughter and applause on television shows in the 1960s. Who’d have dreamed they were teaching all the coming generations to be Pavlov’s dog with their emotions responses to what went on around them fed directly off a cathode ray tube?
That Santa Fe Trail on the image above is where the routes for land traffic from Saint Louis to Santa Fe converged before choo choo trains got into the act. It’s the tracks of thousands of wagons, horses, mules and oxen branded into the landscape.
On the ground it’s abraded vertical walled arroyos a hundred yards wide. You can follow it all the way from Santa Fe to Saint Louis if you know what you’re looking for. And you’ll be able to do it again a thousand years from now if the mood strikes you and you have the time.
I’m just wondering what the consequences will be for Shiva the Cow Cat letting her attention drift over to the full moon.
Old Jules
Posted in 2000's, Animals, Astronomy, Human Behavior, New Mexico, NM, Science
Tagged animals, cats, culture, environment, Events, footprints, Fort Union, History, Human Behavior, humor, Life, lifestyle, misc, miscellaneous, music, Nature, New Mexico, other, Santa Fe Trail, science, society, tracks
Good morning readers. I’m obliged you came by for a visit. Yesterday the online comp spent most of the day doing its own thing. It all began with some pesky notices in the lower-right part of the screen I’d been getting about updates something someone somewhere thought I needed to turn the computer off to install.
I don’t like strangers telling me what I need to do, so I always just clicked the little X and made it go away. But the comp was going so skitzy and all the usual suspects didn’t speed it up, nor help anything load right. As a last resort, I let the nagging signboard do what it wanted. And it turned out what it wanted was to download umpty-ump megabytes of something-or-other most of the day.
Which actually, eventually helped. Made me wonder whether it would be advisable to download this browser upgrade websites had been pestering me about all through 2011, claiming their sites wouldn’t support the version I was using after 2011. Which I naturally responded to by clicking the handy X.
I don’t let any website tell me whether my browser’s going to be supported or not. But since I was already letting strangers push me around and tell me what to do, I figured what-the-hell.
Don’t ever let anyone tell you upgrading a browser on a slow connection is some easy, fast thing to do. Hours upon hours, it took.
But don’t ever let them tell you it doesn’t make a difference on the way the comp behaves itself, either.
But, I’ve digressed.
Just before beginning this post I clicked my young consciousness over to http://spaceweather.com/ to get updated on all the important news and make certain Old Sol didn’t need any help getting up over the horizon. He didn’t, but I came across this:
DOOMED MARS PROBE PHOTOGRAPHED: Russia’s Mars probe, Phobos-Grunt, has been stranded in Earth orbit since a main engine failure in early November. The spacecraft is now sinking back into Earth’s atmosphere, with re-entry expected in mid-January. “On New Year’s Day, I traveled to the French Riviera (850km from home) to record Phobos-Grunt’s last passage over France,” says astrophotographer Thierry Legault. This is the picture he took through a 14-inch telescope.
“It appears that the satellite is moving backwards with its solar panels deployed but not receiving the sunlight,” notes Legault. “This may explain why Phobos-Grunt had no energy to communicate with Earth.” An 80-second video shows the probe soaring almost directly above Legault’s observing site on the Plateau de Calern. “At the scale of the video the satellite would cross your screen in about 1/30s,” he says.
While a telescope is required to see the outlines of the spacecraft, the human eye alone is sufficient to see Phobos-Grunt as a speck of light in the night sky. On high passes, it glows almost as brightly as a first magnitude star. Check SpaceWeather’s online Satellite Tracker or your smartphone for flyby times.
That Russian Grunt bears a striking visual similarity to the Toyota Grunt sitting across the meadow, when you look under the hood. Yeah, on the Russian Grunt the bell housing’s out front and the radiator’s behind, trying to catch up. But otherwise, there’s a lot of kinship between the two.
Both have a lot of miles on them, and neither one’s running the way it was designed to do. If the Russians don’t want the thing I’d sort of like for it to come down out in the meadow here to see if I could rob some parts off it for the Toyota.
But this has all gotten longer than I intended it to be. I’ll save the cat matters for some other post, except to say they all send their regards to you people hanging around in the non-hereabouts parts of the world.
Thanks for coming by.
Old Jules
Posted in 2000's, Animals, Solitude
Tagged animals, cats, country life, humor, lifestyle, miscellaneous, society, technology
74 years old, a resident of Leavenworth, KS, in an apartment located on the VA campus. Partnered with a black shorthaired cat named Mister Midnight. (1943-2020)
Since April, 2020, this blog is maintained by Jeanne Kasten (See "About" page for further information).
https://sofarfromheaven.com/2020/04/21/au-revoir-old-jules-jack-purcell/
So Far From Heaven 